Biographical Landscape offers an opportunity to revisit the works of Stephen Shore, one of the most prominent and influential American photographers to emerge in the last half-century. Focusing on Uncommon Places—Shore’s essential series on the American vernacular landscape produced between 1973 and 1982, Biographical Landscape provides an opportunity to reexamine this work in the context of his broader oeuvre, unearthing the conceptual underpinnings that inform his work throughout.

What makes this work transcend the ordinariness of the subject matter is Shore’s unsurpassed artistry and technical skill as a photographer, coupled with his unique vision of each location that he documents. Quintessentially American scenes are transformed into uncommon places that seem frozen in space and time. The viewer of a Shore photograph is seduced by the colors, the density of information, and the everyday familiarity of the locations.

Aperture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to photography and the visual arts, has organized this traveling exhibition and produced the accompanying publications.

View additional images from the exhibition.

This exhibition, drawn primarily from the Haggerty’s permanent collection, features rare books and manuscripts from the 14th through 20th centuries. Focusing on devotional texts, the exhibition includes a 19th century Koran, medieval Books of Hours and antiphonals (choral books). Individual leaves from French, English and Italian breviaries, Bibles and Books of Hours are highlighted, as well. The exhibition also includes facsimiles of medieval Haggadoth.

The elaborate illustrations, illuminations and calligraphy found in these early texts remind the contemporary reader of the laborious processes involved in ancient bookmaking. In addition to the preparation of parchment, the formulation of pigments and the binding of pages, there was also the grueling work of the scribe:

“The labor of the scribe is the refreshment of the reader: the former weakens the body, the latter profits the mind. Whoever you may be, therefore, who profit by this work, do not forget the laboring one who made it, so that God, thus invoked, will overlook your sins. Amen. Because one who does not know how to write thinks it no labor. I will describe it for you, if you want to know how great is the burden of writing: it mists the eyes, it curves the back, it breaks the belly and the ribs, it fills the kidneys with pain, and the body with all kinds of suffering. Therefore, turn the pages slowly, reader, and keep your fingers well away from the pages, for just as a hailstorm ruins the fecundity of the soil, so the sloppy reader destroys both the book and the writing. For as the last port is sweet to the sailor, so the last line to the scribe. Explicit, thanks be to God.”*

An essay by Dr. Wanda Zemler-Cizewski (Associate Professor, Department of Theology, Marquette University), will accompany the exhibition. Dr. Zemler-Cizewski has done extensive research on the Haggerty’s collection of manuscripts. Books have generously been loaned to the Haggerty for this exhibition from UWM’s Division of Archives and Special Collections and Nashotah House.

*Comments by the scribe Florentius of Valeranica (10th century)

Leaf from a Breviary
Italian, 15th century
Ink, gold leaf, tempera on parchment
72.17
Haggerty Museum of Art
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Joan Pick

In the short history of video art, there have been two primary modes of expression, “feedback” and “immersion.” Early closed-circuit video feeds were used as an electronic mirror, instantaneously reflecting whatever came into the camera’s gaze. More recently, there has been a shift as many contemporary artists use a more cinematic, “immersion”–style approach in installations with one or more projected images. This exhibition considers the connections between these two prevalent expressions in video from the last fifteen years, focusing on works that have a significant relationship between sound and image and those that are purposefully silent. Using examples of work by fourteen artists from around the world, the exhibition will show that a response to the moving image can occur on many sensory levels within both “feedback” and “immersion” practices; many of the works try to break down the traditional opposition between viewer and viewed by emphasizing a more inclusive interaction. Artists represented in the exhibition include Janet Biggs, Burt Barr, Johanna Billing, Slater Bradley, Mircea Cantor, Patty Chang, Amy Globus, Jesper Just, Mads Lynnerup, Christian Marclay, Rodney McMillian, Anri Sala and Salla Tykkä.

The exhibition was organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. It was realized in part with support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Fifth Floor Foundation, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. The exhibition was funded in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Additional support for the exhibition was provided by Hermes.

JANET BIGGS (American, b. 1959)
Predator and Prey, 2006
Two-channel video installation, shown on eight Plasma screens
Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York